What good is FlashHelp?

I'm still using RoboHelp X5, but I've been using FlashHelp for a year. I use it for its vertical skins (specifically Ice-Vertical) so that it resembles Microsoft Office's help (single-pane help, docked to the right of our application). I haven't tried editing the FlashHelp skins (with the SDK that's in RoboHelp's program files). I don't know Flash, so it's too much of a learning curve. But the FlashHelp skin I'm using was close enough to our color scheme that it didn't require any customizing. Our customers prefer FlashHelp over WebHelp, because it takes less screen space running with our application.

A major drawback to FlashHelp is its search feature -- you can't do Boolean searches. Everything's an "or" search. For example, searching for "purchase order" (with or without the quotes) returns topics with the words "purchase" or "order", not the phrase "purchase order". WebHelp seemed to work with the quotes.

As far as the tabs and 3D look, some of the skins have the gel-looking buttons, and some have tabs (e.g. "Red" skin). This is in X5, so there may be more in 6.

Welcome to the forums.

One of the main strengths of FlashHelp is that it works cross-browser and cross-platform. Also, if you have Adobe Flash and know a little about editing objects and frames, you can edit the Flash skin files to make them look pretty much any way you like (one of the reasons I use FlashHelp). In particular, the Slate skin already has a tabbed look, so that one may give you a head start.

The default toolbar buttons/tabs are Contents, Index, Search, Glossary, and Print (in whatever order you specify when you generate the FlashHelp output). Rick Stone's site has loads of information about manipulating buttons in the toolbar, so you may find info on making toolbar buttons/tabs do what you want there. In Rick's table of contents, click Grimoires > Skinny on Skins and download one of the files.

Hope this helps,

Ben